My calendar

A calendar is a race that comes back by itself. You describe it once, you say at what rhythm it is to be held, and the game creates it for you — every day, every week or every month, without your having to think about it.

It is the tool that makes the difference between an occasional manager and an established one. A meeting of six daily races is six calendars set once and for all.

A calendar is not a race

The distinction is worth making, because it explains all the rest of the screen: a calendar is a recipe, not a dish. It does not live in the race lists, the owners do not see it, and one does not enter it.

The race itself is created when the time comes — the number of days before the start that you have given — and becomes at that instant an ordinary race, changeable and deletable like the others. That delay is therefore also the length of time during which the entries are open: two days before, and the owners have two days to enter.

The five plannings

Every day: one race a day. The choice of regular managers.
Every week: you choose the day.
Every month: you choose the number of the day.
Only once: the race is created on the wanted date, then the calendar puts itself Paused. Handy for announcing an event long in advance without having to come back to it.
On demand (model): never creates anything. It is a pattern, which appears in the Using a model list at the moment of creating a race by hand and fills the whole form in one go. See Create a race.

This last choice is the least obvious and one of the most useful: it is where one files one's proven formulas, and one then creates a race in three clicks rather than twenty.

The three statuses

Active: the calendar is running.
Paused: it creates nothing any more, but it is kept. It is also where it puts itself when it has done its office (Only once) or when its time slot is saturated.
Deactivated for lack of sulkies: this status is one the game sets. At the moment the calendar was to create its race, your balance did not cover the announced winnings. The race was not created, the calendar stopped, and you received an internal message with a link to it.

A stopped calendar does not restart by itself: it has to be put back to Active, through the selection menu or by opening it. It is the most frequent breakdown of the trade — one does not understand why the races have ceased, and it is simply that a deduction did not go through three days ago.

Note: a calendar in Automatic mode has nothing to put up, since the winnings are worked out at closing. It can therefore never stop for lack of sulkies. That is one more argument for Automatic when you want to set up races and stop watching over them.

Reading a line

The name of the calendar, which is also the name each race will bear. It is clickable and opens the calendar. Underneath, the speciality, the distance and the class.
Last start: the last race to come out of this calendar, its name leading to its card, then its number of entrants and its profit. It is the most precious column of the screen, and we come back to it below.
Next starts: two pieces of information one above the other, which explains the plural. First, if a race has already been created and is not yet run, its date, clickable, which opens that race for changing. Then the calendar's own next due date — or its status, if it is paused, deactivated, or if it is a model.
The criteria, summarised as on a race.
The minimum of entrants and the break-even threshold.
Delete.

The last race's profit, or how to tune a calendar

A calendar one never reads over produces the same race indefinitely, good or bad. The Last start column is there so that one does read it over: it says, for each formula, how many horses came and what the race brought in.

Three common readings:

Few entrants, negative profit: the formula is too narrow, or the threshold too low. Widen the criteria, or raise the threshold, or switch to Automatic.
Many entrants, comfortable profit: you can lower the threshold to make the race more attractive still, or duplicate it at another time.
Entrants in brackets: the race was cancelled or deleted, and the entries refunded. The figure recalls how many horses were there. If that repeats itself, the formula does not hold up.

Deleting, activating, pausing

Each line carries its Delete button, and the selection menu lets you act on several calendars at once: Activate, Put on pause, Delete.

Deleting a calendar does not touch the races it has already created. They stay in place with their entrants, and will take place normally. Deletion therefore costs nothing, and Put on pause is still preferable when one hesitates: a paused calendar is reactivated, a deleted calendar has to be typed in again.

Two traps

The saturated time slot. Two races of the same class cannot start on the same minute, and an hour holds only sixty minutes. If the sixty are already taken — by existing races or by the due dates of other calendars of the same class —, the calendar finds no place: it puts itself Paused and you receive a message. At creation, the window simply refuses to save. The remedy is simple: choose another time slot. It is also a good habit for being seen — a race at 03:00 finds fewer people than a race at 21:00.

The track is copied afresh at the creation of each race. If, on that day, the track the calendar designates is absent, deactivated or shorter than the distance asked for, the race is run on the default track and its distance is brought back to what that track allows. Redrawing a track can therefore silently change the races to come. See My race track.

The filters

The sort by next due date — the original setting, which puts at the top what is about to start — or by name, more practical as soon as one has twenty calendars.

Then the status, the class, the speciality and the age. The status filter is worth knowing about: setting Deactivated shows at a stroke every calendar fallen for lack of sulkies, and it is the first thing to look at when one notices that one's races have become scarce.

To go further

The detail of each field is in Create an automatic race. And to understand what the winnings and the threshold cost you, see the racecourse manager's trade.